Friday, April 24, 2009

Saturday in Wuxi, China.

My son Tony loves rough-housing with me. The past week, since his return from Beixing, our favorite activity has been to play Crash Daddy!. Tony charges at me; I put my arms up to deflect his onslaught. He think it's the best thing.

A student, I just had, had never heard of Spell Checkers before.

In the NHL playoffs, it looks as if the Canucks will meet the winner of the Flames-Black Hawks series. Unless, of course, the Sharks can come back from a 3-1 deficit against the Ducks in which case the Canucks would play the Red Wings in the second round. This Canucks' enthusiast says "Go Ducks Go!". He also says "Go Black Hawks!".

Lately, I have had these people approach me, with mobile phones in their hands, trying to sell them to me. Where did they get those phones? They are probably stolen.

Twitter needs a spam follower filter. I just made five tweets and quickly had two new followers.

This morning, Tony grabbed a bag of chips my wife had opened last night, and was eating the leftover chips. He even tried to feed me some.

I told my wife I was thinking of taking some time off work. I have vacation time coming. However, my wife took me to mean that it was good as done. She went ahead and made the plans. She wasn't happy when I told her she had to scuttle them. Oops!

From John Derbyshire and Radio Derb: The Oprah administration has declared Canada to be a security threat: Our Secretary for Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has hit the ground running. She is determined to make the homeland secure, and is launching initiatives all over the place. To begin with, Secretary Napolitano has identified the two great looming threats to our security: Canada, and our own conservatives. On the first of those, she told a symposium at the Brookings Institution last month that the administration will take steps to make the U.S.-Canadian border more secure. From June 1st this year, Canadians will have to show a passport when entering the U.S.A. This is great news for us immigration restrictionists. It offers the hope that the flow of Canadian high-school dropouts into our northern states will at last be stanched. American citizens in Montana and Minnesota will no longer have to wait in line at the hospital emergency desk behind people named Mackenzie and Tweed using it as their primary health-care service. Schoolteachers in Washington State will no longer have to waste their time dealing with kids who think the last letter of the alphabet is called "zed." Loggers in Maine will no longer have their wages undercut by illegal Quebecois labor. The streets of Fargo and Boise will no longer be terrorized by gangs like the dreaded Moose Marauders or the even more dreaded MS-13. ("MS" of course standing for Manitoba and Saskatchewan, 13 being the average number of years you have to wait for hip replacement surgery in Toronto.) Perhaps we'll even be able to dispense with those annoying phone menus that tell you to press 2 if you prefer to hear the word "about" pronounced "aboot." Yes, this may be the first step to reclaiming America from invading hordes speaking incomprehensible languages!

I often tell the students if they want to go to America, they should move to Mexico first, and then cross the border.

The wife tells me that fruit and vegtables are getting more expensive.

Are you theory X or theory Y? Researching, in a cursory manner on the Internet, I have found that theory X and Y are competing theories of management styles. Theory X means being more autocratic in management style; Theory Y means being, I would assume, more humane and understanding and tolerant. Now I can remember way back when I was in High School (Neelin High School, Brandon, Manitoba) being handed this questionaire about whether you had Theory X or Theory Y beliefs. I understood it then to mean that if you were a Theory X person, you had a negative view of humanity and the opposite for Theory Y. Most of the students taking this questionaire scored 90 to 10 in favour of Theory Y. One student, who was going to become a cars salesman as soon as he graduated, was the one solid Theory X person. I think of this person as being the only person worthy of admiration from my high school days. I scored 51-49 probably in favour of Theory Y. I thought then that people behave badly depending on the situation. As I have lived out my life, I am becoming more and more of a Theory X person.

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AKIC

I am Canadian. I have lived in Wuxi, China since September 2004. I teach English. In this blog, I recount the things I have seen and the experiences I have had here in Wuxi. I also make comments on things that strike my reactionary fancy.